Is Video the Future of SEO Content?

SEO content has traditionally been an essential tool for driving traffic to websites, with blogs and written articles often serving as the foundation of this strategy. However, while these formats can generate clicks and boost site visits, they frequently fall short in converting those visitors into leads or paying customers. The reason? Written content often lacks the immediacy, engagement, and trust-building qualities required to move potential clients further along the sales journey.

This disconnect between traffic and conversions has left many marketers searching for a better solution. Increasingly, a video-first approach is emerging as the answer. Video content offers a unique opportunity to not only attract an audience but also actively engage and nurture leads. Unlike traditional blog posts, videos can captivate viewers, convey emotion, and deliver information in a way that feels more personal and relatable. This approach aligns with the behaviour of today’s consumers, who favour quick, visual, and interactive content.

Video is particularly effective in aligning with a structured sales funnel. By creating videos tailored to different stages of the customer journey—awareness, consideration, and decision-making—brands can guide potential clients seamlessly from initial interest to a point of purchase. Whether it’s educational videos to address common questions, testimonials to build trust, or product demonstrations to highlight benefits, each piece can play a critical role in converting leads.

Moreover, the authenticity and transparency that video content provides make it a powerful tool for building trust. Consumers are more likely to connect with brands that feel approachable and human. Video achieves this by putting a face to the name, showcasing behind-the-scenes insights, or simply delivering messages in a conversational tone. This kind of engagement builds credibility, making it easier to foster long-term customer relationships.

In this article, we’ll explore why video is rapidly becoming a cornerstone of successful SEO strategies. We’ll examine how it outperforms traditional blogs in engagement metrics, what makes it a natural fit for nurturing leads, and actionable steps you can take to integrate a video-first approach into your marketing efforts. If you’re looking to drive not just clicks but meaningful conversions, it’s time to put video at the heart of your content strategy.

Why ‘top of funnel’ thinking fails without a real conversion strategy

If you’ve ever worked in SEO-driven content marketing, you’ve likely encountered the all-too-familiar scenario: the strategy successfully generates traffic, but that traffic fails to translate into meaningful conversions. The feedback often sounds something like this: *“It’s great that we’re getting more visitors, but why aren’t they converting?”* This concern reveals a critical flaw in many content strategies—while they may increase visibility, they often lack a tangible pathway for turning clicks into customers.

A typical response from SEOs and content strategists is to claim that this traffic is “top of funnel.” However, in reality, there’s often no actual funnel in place. Instead, the strategy tends to involve targeting specific queries and hoping that readers will remember the brand months later when they encounter a related topic. This hope-driven approach rarely delivers consistent results because it lacks a structured process for nurturing those visitors into loyal customers.

The solution lies in creating content that aligns with a genuine sales funnel, rather than relying on chance. This means actively engaging with those visitors after their initial interaction. In practice, this leaves two viable pathways: nurturing leads through email campaigns or connecting with them on social media. In our case, we chose the latter, as it allowed us to maintain ongoing engagement and reconnect with visitors organically, without leaning on paid advertisements.

Through this process, we discovered a more efficient and engaging way to produce content. By incorporating video into our strategy, we found that it not only streamlined the content creation process but also significantly increased audience engagement. This approach, which we term “organic social media retargeting,” leverages video to build stronger connections and drive conversions without additional advertising costs.

In the following sections, I’ll outline both the quantitative and qualitative reasons why video is the most effective medium for transforming your content strategy. From turning content briefs into captivating blog posts to enhancing organic social engagement, video provides an opportunity to truly connect with your audience and nurture them through a structured and impactful funnel.

Why a video-first SEO-driven content marketing strategy is better

Here’s a summary of why video outperforms blog-only content across several key metrics:

Time-efficient creation: Videos often require less time from subject matter experts, making the content creation process more streamlined and efficient.
Audience engagement: Video content is more likely to capture visitors’ attention, encouraging them to follow your brand on social media. Once engaged, these followers can be nurtured further along the sales funnel.
Message retention: Unlike written blogs that are frequently skimmed, videos deliver more of your intended message, ensuring your audience gains a fuller understanding of your content.
Trust-building: Videos allow your audience to connect with you on a personal level, showcasing who you are and building stronger trust compared to text-based content.
User preference: Many users prefer video content over traditional written blogs, making it an effective medium for reaching broader audiences.
Repurposing potential: Video content is highly versatile and can be easily adapted for use across multiple platforms and marketing channels, amplifying its reach and effectiveness.

Incorporating video into your content strategy offers numerous benefits that can help you engage your audience more deeply, build trust, and drive conversions more effectively than relying on blog posts alone.

Video requires less of your subject matter expert’s time

Switching to video content creation offers significant advantages, particularly in industries like healthcare where content demands rigorous expert review. In a one-hour recording session, it’s possible to produce anywhere from two to six videos, which can then be repurposed into written articles. This streamlined approach not only enhances productivity but also reduces delays in the content creation process.

In healthcare marketing, every piece of content must undergo a thorough medical review, whether created by the agency or the client’s team. Reviewing a blog can take a doctor 15 to 45 minutes, and this task is often delayed for weeks, hindering project timelines. In contrast, recording videos requires a fraction of the effort, as speaking to a camera for an hour is far less mentally taxing than meticulously reviewing or editing written material.

For experts, like doctors, dedicating one hour to shoot video is a much smaller commitment than spending one to two hours correcting an article written by someone less knowledgeable in their field. This shift not only saves time but also ensures the content maintains its accuracy and integrity while keeping the production process on schedule.

Additionally, video content alleviates some of the stress associated with traditional workflows. Subject matter experts are less fatigued by video creation compared to exhaustive review sessions, which translates into a smoother collaboration between marketers and specialists.

Ultimately, the transition to video-based workflows has led to a more efficient process, happier and less overburdened experts, and a greater volume of high-quality content being produced in a shorter time.

Potential to earn subscribers, ‘For you’ page views and recommendations

When a potential customer discovers your article through a Google search, reads it, and then leaves, the chances of reconnecting with them organically are extremely slim. In fact, this is the reality for over 98% of blog traffic, where visitors engage momentarily and disappear without further interaction. However, video content can completely change this dynamic.

Embedding a video within your blog creates a more engaging experience. If the visitor chooses to watch the video on YouTube instead of staying on your blog, it opens up new opportunities for connection. Unlike static blog visits, a video view on YouTube can potentially convert the visitor into a subscriber, providing an ongoing channel for communication and content delivery.

Moreover, once someone engages with your video on YouTube, there’s a chance your future content will appear on their personalised “For You” page the next time they browse the platform. This visibility ensures that your brand remains in their digital space, fostering familiarity and increasing the likelihood of further interaction.

Through this approach, your SEO-driven efforts do more than just drive traffic—they position your audience within a funnel that connects your blog and social media presence. By leveraging platforms like YouTube, you can nurture these leads organically without additional advertising costs.

In essence, video content not only enhances engagement but also builds a pathway for ongoing interaction. This strategy transforms passive blog readers into active participants in your social ecosystem, making your content marketing more impactful and measurable.

Visitors are receiving more of your message through videos

If you’ve ever reviewed Hotjar recordings of visitor behaviour on your website, you’ve probably noticed a common pattern. Most users tend to skim through the headlines and occasionally stop to read a few specific paragraphs. This means they are likely missing significant portions of the information you intended to communicate to them.

This selective reading habit creates a challenge for delivering key messages effectively. Even with well-crafted blog content, much of the valuable information might go unnoticed simply because visitors aren’t engaging with it fully.

In contrast, this behaviour isn’t as prevalent with YouTube videos. People are far less likely to “skim” a video compared to a written article. Instead, they are more inclined to consume the content in its intended sequence, provided the video captures their interest early on.

The key lies in learning how to grab and maintain their attention throughout the video. Once you achieve this, the audience is far more likely to stay engaged and absorb the message you’re trying to deliver.

This distinction highlights the unique strength of video content in ensuring your audience receives and retains the information you wish to share, making it a powerful tool in content marketing strategies.

What does the data have to say about this?

Our team initially decided to compare the on-page engagement of articles before and after we introduced videos. This approach aimed to measure how video content might enhance visitor interaction on our blog pages.

It’s worth noting that while this article focuses on generating new content using video, retrofitting existing blogs with videos is often the first step in transitioning to a video-first strategy. However, this comparison method has its limitations. It doesn’t account for visitors who click on the embedded video and view the content directly on YouTube.

Interestingly, encouraging visitors to watch videos on YouTube is a key part of our strategy. Doing so increases the chances of them subscribing to our channel or seeing our content on their “For You” page. However, this practice can distort metrics like average visit duration in tools such as GA4, making it harder to evaluate on-page engagement accurately.

To address this, our next approach was to compare the visit duration of traffic originating from YouTube with that of organic search traffic. This provided a clearer picture of how these different groups of visitors interacted with our website and its content.

Essentially, we focused on understanding the behaviour of YouTube visitors who had already spent 2 to 20 minutes watching videos before arriving at our site. Analysing their engagement offered valuable insights into how video content influences user interaction across our digital platforms.

What does our experience with customers have to say about this?

“It’s so weird to be talking to you right now; I was just watching you on my screen six hours ago.”

“I already know what you guys do, and I love it. How much does it cost, and if we work with you, when can we get started?”

“I’ve always seen SEOs as the crypto bros of marketing, but I could tell you’re a straight-shooting Jersey guy that I can trust.”

These are just a few of the quotes I’ve gathered during discovery calls over the past two years. In fact, I could provide at least two dozen similar examples, all from prospective clients who first encountered us through our video content.

This level of engagement and trust simply doesn’t happen with leads who find us through our blog. When someone discovers you through written content alone, there’s often an underlying scepticism — “Are you legitimate, or do you have no idea what you’re doing?” However, this doubt fades significantly when they’ve already spent 25 minutes watching your YouTube videos.

Interestingly, I’ve also noticed a drop in our pipeline during times when our video output slowed for one reason or another. Video content not only builds trust but also sustains momentum, helping to consistently attract and engage potential clients.

Videos can be more easily repurposed than blogs

I’m placing content repurposing last for a reason: while many marketers consider it the primary benefit of a video-first strategy, it’s not as simple as it might seem.

Repurposing content can sound like an easy win, but it’s not always straightforward. For example, it’s not easy to get genuine engagement on a video posted to LinkedIn or Instagram Reels if the intention is for it to be discovered via organic search on Google or YouTube.

While it’s definitely possible to extract valuable nuggets from your long-form video content that can stand alone as short-form posts, there’s a big temptation to cut corners and not properly tailor these clips for the specific platform.

If you choose to repurpose video content for other platforms, that’s great, but make sure you know exactly what you’re doing. If you don’t adapt it correctly, you risk annoying your audience, which could end up damaging your broader social media strategy.